high or low but all together

Sirach 35:12-17

Give to the Most High as he has given to you, and as generously as you can afford. For the Lord is the one who repays, and he will repay you sevenfold. Do not offer him a bribe, for he will not accept it; and do not rely on a dishonest sacrifice; for the Lord is the judge, and with him there is no partiality. He will not show partiality to the poor; but he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged. He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan, or the widow when she pours out her complaint.

Psalm 84:1-7

How dear to me is your dwelling, O LORD of hosts! My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young, by the side of your altars, O LORD of hosts, my king and my God. Happy are they who dwell in your house! They will always be praising you. Happy are the people whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way. Those who go through the balsam valley will find it a place of springs, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water. They will climb from height to height, and the God of gods will be seen in Zion.

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing… At my first defense no one came to my support, but all deserted me. May it not be counted against them! But the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Luke 18:9-14

Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating at his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

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This weekend some of my friends are gathering in Chicago with a great many others to do some work called “Dec-colonizing.”  What does this mean? It means there are a great many cultural minorities within the Lutheran church who have decided the centuries of assumptions about what it means to be Lutheran have actually been sucking this church dry of its Gospel power, and they are re-claiming the radical hospitality and world-shaking possibilities that are alive and active in the Good News of Jesus Christ. While they are there this weekend, Westboro Baptist Church is across the street protesting at University of Chicago. You know Westboro Baptist, right? They protest at Marine funerals, they have all those picket signs about who God hates, they call down God’s wrath upon just about anybody who isn’t them. Now I know that while I was in Chicago at seminary there were many of us who were very proud to say that we are most definitely NOT affiliated with Westboro Baptist, yet it has only been a year or two since someone in the seminary community wrote the words “white power” on the pane glass windows of the seminary cafeteria, during Black History Month. We may not be Westboro Baptist, but we have a long way to go to get to where we need to be.

It’s our nature, though, isn’t it, to compare ourselves to others in order to feel good about ourselves. How many of us even hear this parable today of the Pharisee and the tax collector and say to ourselves, “well, at least I’m not a Pharisee.” Or maybe we’d like to be as lawful and religiously righteous as the Pharisees nowadays. It’s complicated, after all, isn’t it? We’re Pharisees sometimes, and sometimes we’re tax collectors. The opening to the parable tells us right off what the point is: regarding others with contempt is not the way of God’s kingdom. But even the most religious among us fall into this trap. 

Looking at the ways we try to grow churches today, welcoming outsiders or making our mission as clear as a bell, we are already stuck, like both the Pharisee and the tax collector, in this “us and them” system, this “insider/outsider” mentality. It’s the snag that gets in the way of the Gospel, the shame of being different, the dehumanizing of those with whom we disagree just so we can feel superior, or at the very least, safe.

We see this all the time, especially in church culture. That old song “they will know we are Christians by our love” is laughable to anyone who has ever been hurt by the church, and yet when hurt happens, we try our best to distance ourselves from it, thanking God that at least we’re not ‘those terrible Christians,’ because ‘we’re different,’ right? We don’t actively kill black people here in this congregation. We don’t support so-called ‘reparative therapy,’ or tell certain groups of people that they’re going to hell. No way, no how. At least we’re not ‘those’ Christians. But what about those of us who are? Setting ourselves apart is only going to set up barriers to real reconciliation. Cutting off a part of the body of Christ because it feels easier than confronting our own pain and privilege leads to more damage being done, not to healing.

That’s what the tax collector in the temple seemed to understand. “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” he prayed. One of this week’s commentaries noticed the complexity of being a tax collector in those days. It wasn’t just black and white, good and bad, in a situation where oppression and shame came from both the colonizing culture and the religious authorities. That tax collector must have felt so stuck in his situation, working to feed his family while at the same time knowing that work took advantage of his own community. And naming the struggle is half, is most of, the battle, isn’t it? From the Pharisee’s willful blindness we have the contrast of the tax gatherer’s painfully clear vision of things as they were. It’s the way Luther talks about the Theology of the Cross, calling a thing what it is. Call a spade a spade. Call injustice injustice. Don’t offer a dishonest sacrifice, or sugar-coat it with “well, it’s not as bad as it could be,” or “at least we’re not Westboro Baptist Church.”

Because making excuses for the awful ways we mistreat each other or avoid confronting those mistreatments is equivalent to giving them our consent. Staying silent in the locker room when somebody makes a sexist comment is offering support to the guy who dares to talk about a woman like her worth is his alone to judge. Keeping quiet in the break room when people make jokes about violence against Muslims only offers support to the violent. And naming our part in these silences is so painful. I was part of a panel last week that perpetuated a lot of misinformation about the LGBTQ community, because I thought it could be a good thing, I really wanted to be part of a church that was better than the stereotype, and I refused to see the ways it was set up poorly from the start, on account of my own wanting to prove that “at least we’re not Westboro Baptist Church.” Sure, we meant well, but we were under informed to begin with and told a lot of the same stories one might find on a very quick internet search of “gays and Christianity.” It was more than awkward to be on that panel, more awkward than when I came out here almost two years ago. And it didn’t have to be, but because I refused the advice of those who saw more clearly than I where the cracks in our system are, I got myself stuck.

So how do we find healing and strength for this work of having our eyes open to one another and to ourselves when we continue to isolate from each other, to name call and point fingers and interrupt and avoid? I mean, there’s a good reason Paul says he has fought the good fight, not that he has avoided trouble well. He was imprisoned often for his proclamation of the Gospel, and even though we Christians in this country have a lot of assumed power, breaking out of those assumptions into actual freedom for everybody is not an easy task, especially for we who are in the positions of cultural privilege.

God have mercy on us all who are living in these systems of fear and suspicion, because whether we’re top dog or scraping the bottom of the barrel, we’re all in this together. The mercy and grace of God is that we have each other’s lives as witness to realities outside of our own limited experiences. It is good news that the world God made is large and diverse and creative and beautiful and painful and always being made new. The good news is that we are still alive, still have time to turn walls into bridges, still have prophetic voices among us like those at the Decolonize event this weekend in Chicago, and even here among us in Chatham, who are brave and passionate and guided by the Spirit of resurrection, turning over the tables of death and uncovering springs of living waters.

God have mercy on us all who are living in complicated times, interesting times, who have decisions to make not only about governments but about the smaller, day-to-day micro-aggressions and little injustices all around, those things ‘done and left undone, said and left unsaid.’ It is good news that God has given us each other in these days, for challenge and for freedom. That the Christ, the God enfleshed who lives among us, does not let us go on our way willfully ignorant, but wakes his disciples up to the world around us. So that we may live in the world fully engaged with our neighbors and fully alive without fear of judgment or shame. The forgiveness and mercy of God comes in these gifts of one another, these opportunities to work together for justice, these new beginnings that our world is full of, morning after morning, day after day. We are all in this together, disciples of the crucified and risen lord Jesus. Never alone, never forgotten, always receiving new life.